The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [46]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature' (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.'
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater power, even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organised religions.
7.
The link between God and sublime landscapes is made most explicit in one book of the Bible. The circumstances are peculiar: God is asked by a righteous but desperate man to explain why his life has become full of suffering. And God answers him by bidding him to contemplate the deserts and the mountains, rivers and ice caps, oceans and skies. Seldom have sublime places been asked to bear the burden of such a weighty, urgent question.
At the beginning of the Book of Job, described by Edmund Burke as the most sublime book of the Old Testament, we learn that Job was a wealthy, devout man from the land of Uz. He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. His wishes were obeyed, and his virtue was rewarded. Then one day disaster struck. The Sabaeans stole Job's oxen and asses, lightning killed his sheep and the Chaldeans raided his camels. A hurricane blew in from the desert and wrecked the house of his eldest son, killing him and his siblings. Painful sores developed from the soles of Job's feet to the top of his head, and, as he sat in the ashes of his house, he scratched them with a piece of broken pottery and wept.
Why had Job been so afflicted? His friends had the answer: he had sinned. Bildad the Shuhite told Job that his children could not have been killed by God unless they and Job himself had done wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,' said Bildad. Zophar the Naamathite ventured that God must have been generous in his treatment of Job: ‘Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.'
But Job could not accept these words. He called them ‘proverbs of ashes' and ‘defences of clay'. He had not been a bad man—so why had bad things happened to him?
It is one of the most acute questions asked of God in all the books of the Old Testament. And from a whirlwind in the desert, a furious God answers Job as follows:
Who is this that darhneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for! will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?…
By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?
Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?…
Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?…
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?
Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?…
Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?
Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south?
Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?
Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job's attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains.